There is an excellent chance you have spent time at The Hollywood Center Motel — if only onscreen.
The Rockford Files shot there. So did Cannon, Mannix and T.J. Hooker. In 1997’s L.A. Confidential, a character turns up in one of its rooms with his throat slit, and the place pops up again in a 2008 episode of NCIS.
“I take it the Ritz was booked,” a character quips while surveying the seedy surroundings.
With its kidney-shaped pool, aging breeze-block walls and glowing neon sign — and a main structure that bared some resemblence to Psycho‘s Bates Motel — it never required much set dressing. It was what it was — an iconically down-market destination that, on film, “simply played itself,” as Hollywood Heritage, the historic preservation nonprofit, put it in its application nominating the property for landmark status.
And on Jan. 4, it caught fire.
